Presently, patients undergoing surgical procedures requiring long incisions may require their incisions to be closed using sutures, staples, and/or adhesive strips. All of these closing methodologies may have difficulties, to varying degrees, with patient comfort, speed (for the clinician), clinical outcome (suture related infection/irritation), recovery time and cosmesis.
Skin closure strips, such as conventional adhesive bandages, are utilized for closure of relatively superficial skin wounds. However, the contact adhesives that are used with such strips typically retain adhesion for no more than a day or two and can lose adhesion quickly in the presence of moisture, for example, perspiration.
While improved materials and methods for wound approximation are generally known, for example, co-assigned U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0009099, these improved materials may be more generally accepted and more widely used if dispensing devices adapted to the unique characteristics of these materials were available. Therefore, a need continues to exist for devices and methods for dispensing materials useful in wound approximation and tissue bonding to provide a wider range of applications for these materials, from external to internal use, and from essentially non-biodegradable (where the materials are removed from the application site) to biodegradable (where the materials are not directly removed from the application site and degrade over time).